And here’s some ‘both sides’ coverage on choosing colleges from the students’ perspective, thanks to our current political issues:
The new survey found that 31 percent of liberal applicants struck colleges from their lists for political reasons — especially abortion rights. The most-rejected states were Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Florida.
“It actually tracks with conversations I’ve been having with my peers,” said Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami. “If you’re female, there’s some chance that you might need access to an abortion, and there are some states where that’s not possible. If you’re LGBTQ, you want to go to schools and to states that are friendly toward that.”
Likewise, 28 percent of conservative applicants ruled out states on political grounds — namely California and New York. Conservatives rejected states less for specific policies and more for fear of an overarching, oppressive liberalism, on campus and off.
“I completely understand why some people would choose to be with their own, as opposed to being in a sea of people who are politically opposed to them, on either side of the aisle,” said Nate Sirotovitch, 20, a junior at New York University who leads the College Republicans.
It’s basic human rights versus the ability to gang up together: tomato, tomahto, right?
Also let’s just gloss over the fact that for anyone in a conservative state who can’t afford out-of-state tuition and is gay or a woman well… fuck them!!!
Hate making people unable to get an education is not the equivalent of acceptance allowing people to get an education but being restricted as an option only to very rich and very lucky.
I’m not a fan of viewing higher education as career training, but do agree we need to return to the previous model where it was inexpensive or free to attend. Greed ruins too many institutions intended for the public good.
Absolutely. I don’t know who posted an article about this here a few months ago (you? @anon61221983?), but the link between the decline of free or nearly-free college and the rise of integration and more women attending is absolutely inescapable.
Another on that topic:
It’s also true that as college became less about “public good” and more about “how to have a career,” the idea of paying for it became acceptable. But it’s inescapable that the decline of tuition-free college was clearly linked to an increase in People of Color and women attending.
On the UK-side I got a brief history of my uni. It got massively expanded by the Tories so there’d be enough uni places for the baby boomers. Then there’s a corridor that just stops because Labour got control and saw uni as somewhere rich kids lounged about for 3 years.
Maybe there was a similar shift on that side of the pond - it was never a “public good” but something privileged folks managed to get Uncle Sam to pay the bill for.
I’m not sure about the UK history of it, but in the US, there is definitely a racist and sexist element to the defunding of public universities and subsequent rise in expenses. It parallels the same effort in public schools post Brown v Board and desegregation.
When it was just privledged White men going to college, the bigots in power were perfectly fine with free or nominal tuition. But once women and minorities started going to college, that had to change, and those people had to be made destitute in order to maintain the hierarchy. When those people started becoming faculty, something had to be done about that, too. That’s the underlying racism and sexism of the adjuct and contract-based instructor system.
I wish I could lay eyes on the article that was posted here previously. It contained written memos from folks in Reagan’s California Governor’s admin, and people in conservative think tanks, laying this out explicitly.
Just like with voting rights issues like “the War on Drugs”, gerrymandering and voter supression, we are now at the stage where the generation of Republicans who pulled this racist shit have passed and the documents linking their strategies and tactics to their motivations have become public.
In a functioning judicial system, the courts would be presented with these documents and would not only rule against them, they would apply penalties against the GOP for lying about it in previous court cases for decades. But with a corrupt, right-wing headlock on SCOTUS, there is no real justice in our courts right now.
Ive been watching it, i think it’s better than “The Chair.” It does still have the “professors are weirdos” trope, but yeah, it’s great to see a central plot point that exposes the neoliberal assault on conditions for those working in higher ed (including tenured profs).
I knew about Waterloo’s grade adjustment system in the 80’s, and grade inflation was a thing we were aware of at the time, so I’m not sure that it’s news per se. Engineering in particular tracks each high school’s students’ grades before/after enrollment and notes the changes, which becomes a proxy for grade inflation at the high school in question.
For context, Waterloo is very careerist in the sense that Co-op Education (4 year degree becomes 5 with 2 years of work placement) is mandatory in Engineering and highly subscribed in Math/CS and the Sciences.
Anyhow, the schadenfreudische kicker in this article is that the highly-exclusive, private, Upper Canada College has one of the biggest grade penalties at Waterloo. Their students’ marks drop by -19.4% in Engineering on average.
Maybe just not having grades would be better, and instead focus on mastery of the material. That seems doable, especially in a field like engineering, where you either understand and can apply a concept, or you can’t.
That’s a tricky one. I’m a fan of co-op for such fields because the work-term report and assessment by the employer factors into the final transcript for the degree, so there’s some flavour of that. It’s hard to hide poor mastery when you’re in the field.
When I was TA’ing engineering at Queen’s we saw a (very) few egregious cases of cheating that turned out to be hard to stamp out. When a student is ready to get nasty and play politics it can be hard to assert authority. In , engineers in particular are sworn to uphold their profession against faulty work on the memory of a particularly awful bridge disaster a century ago.It is always, or should be, foremost in mind that it’s a profession that kills people in large numbers when things go wrong. There’s real professional pressure to weed out kids who are not serious.
What is controversial about this for admissions? It seems like a good policy to level-set for students coming in from different high schools with different grading scales and strength of program. US colleges do the same thing, just maybe not to such a degree.
At the university level, nothing. At the high school level, kids at heavily adjusted schools don’t get a chance to stand out from peers on the basis of academic achievement. That sucks.
I was lucky enough to be at a high school in a town full of farmers and engineers. Pragmatism won over posturing and grade inflation was kept firmly in check.
I could definitely see that being a problem if the basis for the adjustment was ad hoc or by rubric, but when it is scaled directly off of the actual university performance of previous graduates of that high school, it’s tough to argue. It’s a great way to fight grade inflation at the high school level. Glad to see that it caught out a private school that was a consistent infringer.
Maybe not, as there are plenty of educational systems that focus on mastery of material without grades. My daughter went to a Montessori school, which did not have grades in the traditional sense… she’s made the transition to college which does have grading just fine. She just focuses on understanding the material at hand, and has the tools to organize her work to do so… So far straight As!
I think there’s always scope for working with that, but in my experience it tended to be for a few truly exceptional students. I saw three students waived straight through undergrad in Waterloo Math into their Ph.d’s, graduating those at around age 18 to 20. They got recognition for having mastered the material; one went on to be the youngest tenured prof ever at MIT (and he’s such a super-nice guy, who hasn’t “faded” and kept up really good, really fun work).
, engineers in particular 